


Dark Days

by Amyla_r



Series: The Authors of Paradise [1]
Category: The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-01-22 11:02:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21300974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amyla_r/pseuds/Amyla_r
Summary: Harry just wanted to enjoy a burger in peace after returning from a particularly grueling case in Louisiana, but then somebody had to go and blot out the sun and dump a recurring psychic attack over the already panicking, blacked-out city. Oh, and then there is that weird portal, and the mysterious, rather surly woman with the dowsing rods, and to top it all off, the entirety of reality is being rewritten under his very nose. All in a night's work.This is the first in a series, a crossover betweenThe Dresden Filesand my own urban fantasy universe,The Authors of Paradise.
Series: The Authors of Paradise [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1535603
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a crossover fan novel featuring my own characters and world of The Authors of Paradise, blended with those of Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files. For ease of reading, each POV change is labeled at the beginning of each chapter. This derivative crossover work is being written for the sheer fun of it, with no financial gain. Jim Butcher owns Harry Dresden, The Dresden Files, and all associated characters. I own Evelyn Alvar, Arabella Thorne, Thornebridge Manor, The Authors of Paradise, and all associated characters. I’ve taken the two worlds, mashed them together, and whipped up this meandering thingamabob. Mmm, tasty.

**i. Evelyn**

I emerged in a room that shifted and warped, always in motion, always changing, and turned my attention to the figure standing at the far end. A softly glowing, color-changing mist curled around my ankles as I walked past impossible staircases and other Mobius-like structures, approaching the figure. It stood dispassionate, sexless, an endless void that glimmered with distant stars. Its name was Thornebridge, and this was the form it took in this place.

If I looked too deeply into that void, I would be drawn in, tumbling helplessly for eons as every potentiality, every reality, every actuality, every universe seared itself indelibly onto my conscious mind. I would know the truth about myself if I did that. I didn’t want to know. I most certainly did not want to know. I was confident it would drive me mad.

My bare feet settled into place, concealed by the mist, as I stopped directly in front of Thornebridge. I was wearing the filmy white thing that I always wore when I Traveled, and hair the color of moonlight tumbled over my marble-toned shoulders. I’d seen my reflection before in this form. I looked like a marble statue with intensely purple-jewel eyes, inhuman and profoundly alien. I had grown accustomed to it, but I still didn’t understand the _why _of it.

“You have something to tell me?” I ventured finally. I would never be entirely _comfortable_ talking with Thornebridge-- if _talking_ was the right word. The entity had its own language, one that didn’t often translate well into English, or any other language with actual words.  


The response was instantaneous. From out of the mist, a great tower pushed its way out of the hidden ground, rumbling like thunder as it grew to a great height. Dust and debris rained down from it as it stretched higher and higher like some kind of monolithic tree, until its top vanished into the star-studded, nebula-swirled darkness above. A pair of winged figures circled the tower, armed with swords, their wings beating the air into a whirlwind as they flew around and around and around it.

A low, animalistic growl surged behind me, and I turned to see a man dressed in robes and expensive finery, crowned by four inverted pentacles that spun around his head. The man looked like a photograph in negative exposure, black and white, light where he should be dark and dark where he should be light. He ran at the tower and leaped on it, clawing at its base, digging to its foundations, tearing off huge chunks of stone and dropping them into a large canvas bag he carried slung over one shoulder. The two angels didn’t seem to see him, continuing their high-altitude patrol.

I sighed. The overall message was obvious, but the details were still obscured. “Who’s attacking you?” I asked.

The robed man vanished from his place by the tower and appeared before me so suddenly that I took a couple of steps backwards. I took a breath to steady myself and turned my eyes to Thornebridge. “But _who is he?”_

The human-shaped starry void said nothing. Of course. It stood still, its head turned towards me.

_I could look into its void and See..._

Shaking my head, I motioned with my hand to the diorama. “If you want our help, you’re going to have to be a bit more clear than that. Okay?”

Thornebridge just watched me. This was apparently the entirety of the message; I wasn’t going to get any more unless I Looked.

I ran my hands through my hair and sighed again. “All right, fine. I’ll see what I can dig up.”

Thornebridge nodded, and the scene vanished, replaced once again with the Escher-like environment. Closing my eyes, I let myself phase through the layers of reality, back to whatever dimension my Traveling form was held in. I felt the threads of silken energy close around me like a cocoon, and my conscious awareness faded to gentle black before becoming aware of the weight and solid mass of my everyday form.

I lay there for a minute, eyes closed, letting my consciousness re-align with physical reality. Slowly, my senses re-connected and began to filter information back to me: the lingering scent of incense, the soothing flow of the meditative music that I had set to play in a loop, the spongy feel of the mat between my body and the hardwood floor, the slight chill in the room that raised gooseflesh over my arms. It was September, and morning, and my stomach informed me that I had not yet eaten breakfast.

Opening my eyes, I stretched, then rose to my feet. The room my housemate Arabella and I had designated for communication sessions with Thornebridge was sparsely decorated with a couple of small tables, a bowl for incense, a scattering of candles, a few carefully placed crystals, some calming prints framed on the walls, a small rock garden, and an iPod set up with a meditation playlist. It was simple and zen, intended to cultivate the kind of relaxation needed to put one’s self into a deep trance.

I turned off the iPod, blew out the candles and the incense, and left the room in the heart of the house, winding my way through corridors that never seemed to follow the same path. I had gotten lost on multiple occasions while trying to find my way through the less stable portions of the house, until I had learned to open my senses enough to navigate my way to the space Arabella and I lived day-to-day. 

I saw the door, and my senses told me it was the one that led to the mundane part of the house. It was always a different door, sometimes massive and intricately carved, sometimes simple and rustic. Today, it was narrow, arterial red, and half my height, sporting an ornate silver knob. I turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped out of the dizzying instability of Thornebridge Manor and into the dimensionally stable, comforting warmth of the house’s living space. 

The difference in energy always takes a moment or two to adjust to. It’s a little bit like waking up from a dream, as reality re-establishes itself around you, solid and fixed. After taking a few slow breaths and doing a little grounding exercise by placing my palm flat against a wall and feeling its solidity, I moved on, making my way to the kitchen. 

_________________________________________

The coffee tasted hot and sweet as I sipped it from my favorite old coffee mug, which depicted a calico cat similar in appearance to my own Nimue, batting playfully at a Victorian-style fairy. The house was strangely quiet and felt vast and empty; Arabella had left town to attend some sort of bookseller’s conference. Slowly, I ate a breakfast of eggs, biscuits, and fruit, as I held my battered, leatherbound notebook in my left hand and read over the notes I had written on this morning’s communication with Thornebridge. A well-worn deck of tarot cards, its colors faded and its edges tattered, rested beside the notebook.  


I took a bite of scrambled eggs, set my fork down, and flipped through the cards, withdrawing the Tower, the Emperor, Temperance, and the Four of Pentacles, laying them out on the table beside my plate. Chewing thoughtfully, I studied the cards, static images embodying the living diorama I had seen in the communication room, but I came no closer to achieving clarity. The only thing I knew for certain was that someone was attacking Thornebridge, someone Arabella and I-- the Guardians of Thornebridge Manor-- had not yet seen or encountered.

That... was not good. There was an endless list of reasons why that was not good. But I still had precious little to go on. _It would be nice,_ I thought, _if the damn house would learn to speak English._

An alarm sounded on my phone, alerting me that it was time to get ready for work, so I put my plate in the dishwasher, returned to my bedroom to dress, made sure my cat and Arabella’s dog Ghost had plenty of fresh water, checked on Virgil the ferret in his little house, and hurried out the door to drive to the shop. There wasn’t a lot I could do until I had more information, and I certainly wasn’t going to figure out the puzzle sitting here all day.

_________________________________________  


I own a little shop called Boreas Curios, Antiques, and Odditites. It’s a quaint little place, sharing a storefront with a pizza parlor and a jewelry store, and is situated directly across the street from Arabella’s place of business, an antique bookstore that she inherited from its former owner when he retired. It was something akin to kismet that the two of us spent years working in these places, across the street from one another, before we met for the first time through completely unrelated events. And it wasn’t for a lack of browsing each others’ shops either-- I love books, and Arabella is a bona fide pack rat and loves to collect all sorts of strange and wonderful things. And vice versa. We just always managed to visit when neither of us was in our respective shop.

The shop was slow throughout the morning, giving me time to sort through inventory and clean a little bit as I tried to shake the lingering feeling that something wasn’t quite right. I chalked it up to the vagaries of my communication session with Thornebridge and carried on. A few minutes to eleven, Violet breezed in through the front door, smiling brightly at me with her black-lipsticked lips as we greeted each other. Her hair was short and spiky, black tipped with blue, and she wore black-and-white striped stockings on her arms and legs, a green corset, a knee-length black tulle skirt, and a pair of worn old army boots. She waved at me with a black-fingernailed hand and disappeared into the back of the shop, re-emerging a short time later wearing a blue apron that absolutely clashed with her getup.

I didn’t mind her eccentric way of dressing; in fact, I felt it fit the atmosphere of the shop perfectly. She cashed in to her register, and then set about helping me sort through a box of mini-Furbies that had been programmed to say diabolical things. The store rang out with sinister phrases such as, “I am Lord Beelzebub, hear me rooooar!” and “Sacrifice your virgins on the altar of the Goat King!” for several minutes as we inserted batteries, cataloged everything in the system, and put the Furbies in a wire bin near the register. The Diabolical Furby Collection was Violet’s idea, and I thought it fit nicely in with the theme of Strange and Bizarre I had cultivated in the shop. After all, I kept a constant supply of haunted dolls on a shelf situated on the back wall. People loved creepy things. They always sold well.

Right around 1:45, just as the lunch rush had mostly dissipated, the sky went dark, not gradually, but in a quick fade, as if somebody had used a dimmer switch to turn off the sun, cloaking the world in night. 

Violet, looking up from where she was ringing up one of the last customers in the store, frowned. “Um. Evelyn?” She paused, then added, “Did somebody forget to pay the sunlight bill?” The joke fell flat as her voice trembled a bit. 

I was busy staring through the glass door, blinking in confusion. The slight uneasiness I had felt earlier amplified itself, evolving into the kind of dread that speeds up the heart rate and sends butterflies swarming through the stomach. Violet clearly felt the same, but it was probably just from the inexplicable celestial event. Right? 

“What in the blazes...” I murmured. Casting a glance at Violet and her equally confused and anxious customer, I strode across the shop and out the door, peering up at the sky, searching for the sun. Violet joined me a minute or two later, after shooing the customers out and locking the door.

“Is... is it an eclipse?” she asked, doubt slowing her words. I shook my head, but pulled my phone from my apron and began pulling up an online almanac to be sure.

“Probably not,” I said. “Wouldn’t have gone dark that quickly.” I scanned the almanac long enough to determine that there had been no eclipses predicted for the day, and then my phone went dark.  


So did the rest of the block. All around us, the lights illuminating the buildings flickered out, plunging the world into heavy darkness. Even the cars on the street died, rolling to a stop. I heard the metallic clatter of a car wreck somewhere in the near distance, and somebody screamed.

The creeping dread flared into visceral, heart-pounding terror, and for a moment, I was lost in it. I wanted to fall to my knees, pull at my hair, and moan with it. I wanted to dig into the ground and hide from the darkness, to curl into myself, to lose myself to the fear, to be consumed by it. It coiled around me, a primal, atavistic horror that threatened to strangle the life from me. I was barely aware of Violet next to me, frozen and trembling with the same terror.

A long moment passed, and the dread eased of its own accord. It still lingered, pulsing softly on a psychic wavelength, but it no longer threatened to drive us mad. I found I had indeed fallen to the ground, and slowly got to my hands and knees, reaching out to help Violet to her feet. The girl was still shaking, her blue eyes wide in the gloom, but she let me stand her up and steady her.

“What _was_ that?” she cried, but then seemed to realize how near to panic she was edging, and took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. She leveled her gaze on me and said, “I’m going to guess you’ll be leaving the shop to me for a bit.”  


I hadn’t ever told Violet about my _other_ job, the one where I worked for the sentient spirit of a dimensionally transcendent and unstable house, but the girl wasn’t stupid. She’d picked up on the fact that I had a tendency to _deal_ with the out-of-the-ordinary things that seemed so often to happen around me. I sighed and ran my hand through my short, wavy hair, a deep chestnut with hints of red and a stark contrast to the flowing silver locks of my Traveling form. 

I turned on my heels and strode around to my car, a 90s-era silver Accord parked in the employee-designated spaces in the parking lot. Violet followed. Unlocking the trunk with the key set I had in my jeans pocket, I removed the emergency bag I kept packed and ready. “Close the shop,” I told her, then frowned. I had been about to tell her to pack up and go home, but she lived several miles away and it seemed as if the cars had all died too. “Stay indoors, keep the doors locked, and watch for looters.”  


“That baseball bat still under the counter?” she asked.  


“Yep,” I said, and paused. If that feeling of dread had been city-wide, it meant we’d be dealing with mass panic, and panicked people can be violent. “But don’t try to be heroic, okay? If anybody gets violent, just get on out of there. Find somewhere safe. There will probably be some sort of organizational effort to keep things under control, maybe a place for people to gather for shelter, a church or something. Try to find it if you can’t stay in the shop.”  


“Gotcha.”  


From the bag I removed a pair of silver rods, slender, about the length of my forearm, and etched with runes, then slung the bag over my shoulder. 

Then, taking a deep breath, I stepped into the darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry steps in.

**ii. Harry**

The entire world exploded into panic, and it completely ruined my lunch at Burger King. I have all the luck.

Hey, I didn’t say it was good luck.

I had just returned from a grueling weekend in rural Louisiana, helping a psychic Paranetter who had found herself unwittingly being used as a conduit for a demonic spirit attempting to take form in the world, care of an object that had been used as a vessel for housing and transporting the spirit in the physical world. That sort of thing doesn’t just randomly happen; somebody had to have called it up and put it there, but I hadn’t quite figured out who, or why. I did know one thing, though– these sorts of incidents were becoming more and more prevalent lately, and widespread. If it was the work of a single person or group, they were throwing one hell of a wide net. 

I had gone and returned by train, disembarking a little after one in the afternoon, hungry and unwashed and exhausted. I hadn’t felt like making anything at Molly’s apartment (I still couldn’t bring myself to call it home. It was borrowed. It wasn’t mine) so I decided to make a grub stop at Burger King.

I ordered. I sat. I started to eat. The sun went out.

Figures.

Burger in hand, I stepped outside to see what was happening, then staggered under the sudden, vicious psychic assault that swept over me like a particularly nasty tidal wave. Before I could even register what was happening, something cold and furious had surged to life inside me with icy fury to press back against the assault. The Mantle of the Winter Knight, taken on after a deal struck out of sheer desperation with Mab, the Queen of the Winter Court of Faerie, came with its own set of perks, which more often than not looked a hell of a lot more like curses to me. The battle seemed to wage for hours, but when the assault lifted, I was sure it had only been minutes. 

I lifted my head and looked around, breathing heavily through flared nostrils, every muscle wound tight and ready to spring into action the instant I saw something to attack. I didn’t feel beaten down or defeated. I felt feral. I felt _enraged_ that something would dare encroach on my space, on my person. All around me, I could see people recovering, still panicked but apparently not under the influence of… whatever that had been. They sprawled on the pavement, some of them sobbing, others stricken to horrified silence, still others clinging to one another as they looked around in vain for what could have caused their sudden collective panic.

They all looked like prey to me. Easy pickings. Vulnerable, confused, weak. It would be so easy to…

Drawing in a deep breath, I closed my eyes and began reciting multiplication tables in my head. It took a minute or two, but the influence of the Mantle waned, and I felt a bit more like myself again.

Whatever that meant these days.

Dragging my thoughts kicking and screaming back into focus, I rose to my feet, letting my eyes travel around in search of anything that could shed light on the situation. I knew I hadn’t been the one to send the psychic attack packing; I’d barely been able to weather it as it was, even with the Winter Mantle leading the defense. Maybe it was on a timer or something. Maybe their favorite show came on T.V. and they just couldn’t stand to miss it. 

Maybe it was a test run, and something bigger and badder was on the way.

“Dammit,” I muttered, and gave a last, mournful look at my burger before tossing it in a nearby trash can. Lunch would have to wait.  


The world wasn’t completely dark, despite the lack of power everywhere, and when I looked up, I saw that the sun was actually obstructed by something, ringed by a brilliant red halo that illuminated the streets below with a dim, dusk-like light. I returned to the car, the World War II-era Cadillac hearse provided for me by the Winter Court, and which I had dubbed the Munstermobile, and retrieved my staff from where I had stashed it in the backseat. 

As I slammed the door, I saw the woman. She approached the restaurant’s parking lot slowly, a pair of thin silver rods crossed in an _X_ in front of her, as if she were dowsing for water. It was hard to make out a lot of detail in the darkness, but I could see that she was short, maybe three or four inches taller than Murphy, with a wild mass of shoulder-length waves and some enticing curves visible beneath her sweater, jacket, and jeans. 

I watched as she disappeared around a building across the street, dowsing rods practically dragging her along behind them, and I began to follow.

As I traced her steps around the building, I became aware of something that reminded me a little bit of Molly’s One Woman Rave, a wash of strobing lights in pink and yellow and red and blue dancing across the brick of the building. I didn’t need to stretch out my wizard’s senses to feel the power gathered there.

Rounding the bend, I saw the woman standing silhouetted before a massive swirling, pulsing vortex of color hovering a couple feet above the pavement. She looked tiny and vulnerable in front of that ocean of energy, as if she could be consumed by it any minute, vanishing into its depths. Cautiously, I moved closer, around to her side, and saw her eyes wide and unblinking as they gazed into the light. An ever-shifting spectrum of color danced across her fair features, giving her an otherworldly cast, making her seem immaterial, almost as if she was made of the light itself. Her eyes stayed locked on the vortex. She wasn’t just seeing; she was Seeing. Her Sight was wide open. God knew what she was seeing in there.

She whirled and anchored those wide, dark eyes on mine. I had to shift my gaze slightly to the side to prevent the start of a soulgaze; that was the last thing I needed right then. She stared for a few seconds, then blinked several times, shaking her head as she evidently closed her third eye. Then she looked up at me again, her features shadowed with suspicion.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing?”  


“Uh,” I said, full of eloquence and wit. 

She took a step towards me. She was more than a foot shorter than me, maybe just a few inches taller than Murphy, but she leaned forward, jutted her jaw, and glared at me.

“Well,” I said, finally deigning to answer her question (but only after a stubborn delay), “I’m Harry, and I was out here going about my day when I thought to myself, _Self, I wonder if there are any big, colorful vortexes to see in town._ And what do you know, I found one. It’s my lucky day.”  


“Vortices,” she said.  


“What?”  


“Not vortexes. Vortices. The plural is vortices.”  


I raised an eyebrow and regarded her for a few seconds, then said, “I also thought to myself, _Self, I wonder if there are any grammar Nazis hanging around those vortexes. _And what do you know, I found one. It’s my lucky day.”  


She rolled her eyes at me and turned back to the vortex. “Okay. I don’t have time for this.” Casting a sideways glance at me, she flapped her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Shoo.”

A wave of icy fury swept over me, that this woman would presume to dismiss me like that, but I had gotten pretty good at discerning the difference between my own emotions and the sharper, colder, more visceral effects of the Winter Mantle. I took a breath, reining in the violent instincts of the Mantle before they could start calling the shots, and regained control.

The woman tensed and turned to look at me, narrowing her eyes as if she had sensed the danger. But before either of us could react further, _something_ came out of the vortex.

It was a nebulous, translucent mass at first, with no real static shape. It seemed to shift and warp as it moved past the swirling colors of the vortex, as if it couldn’t quite decide what shape it wanted to be.

Then it emerged into the cool autumn air and solidified. Muscles rippled as they formed under black, leathery skin, and huge wings unfurled and whipped downward, creating an air current for the creature to hold itself aloft with. The batlike creature turned its head and glared down at us with red eyes, and my first thought was that it was some sort of vampire, but larger. Much larger.

Its long, wolflike muzzle opened and presented us with a hungry smile full of sharp teeth. And then it shrieked, long and loud, and another wave of soul-rending horror descended on the world.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shit gets real. Literally.

**iii. Evelyn**

I had looked into the swirling, prismatic abyss, and had Seen what was emerging from it. I had heard the jarring discordance of its song taking shape. Its energy had blossomed inside my mind like rotting flesh melting aside to reveal the gore held within.

That was why I was ready this time when the creature hurled a wave of suffocating dread in my general direction. The whole world is made of song, if you know how to hear it. When you know the resonance of something, you can counteract it with your own tone.

I drew in a deep breath, opened my mouth, and sang out a long, loud, crystalline note that rang throughout the alley like a giant tuning fork. That single, protracted note I formed into a word, no word in any human tongue but simply a collection of syllables that danced along the threads of my intent and coalesced into pure Will.

The note reached out to the dark, pulsing energy rushing along the channel of the creature’s screech and diverted it away from myself and the man standing beside me, splitting it apart and scattering it to be carried away on the wind. Peripherally, I could see the man lifting his staff, holding it across himself with one hand, and could feel him gathering energy. 

I ran out of breath and my voice dipped to silence as I frantically reached into my bag to retrieve one of the little spherical glass containers I had carefully packed in an interior pocket with plenty of padding. The creature slapped the air with its wings and dove forward, but the man stepped forward, his booming voice echoing throughout the alley. “_Forzare!”_

An invisible wrecking ball slammed into the creature and sent it tumbling backwards towards the portal. Catching itself mid-trajectory with a billow of its wings, it flipped itself in midair, braced its feet on the brick facade of a building, and lunged forward again. The man moved forward, stepping between the monster and me as he hefted his staff. “Get _out _of here, lady!”

Instead of responding, I darted around the man and hurled the glass sphere at the creature with a murmured word. It shattered, releasing the coiled energy that had been contained within, a paralysis enchantment that immediately began to twine around the creature, immobilizing it. It struggled for a few seconds, its wings beating the air, then fell to the pavement and was still.

I glowered at the man. “You were saying?”

“Don’t get too comfy, toots,” he replied, gesturing at the creature with his free hand. He still held the staff at the ready, and had a wild, almost feral look in his eyes, his body coiled taut as if readying himself to spring into action again. Despite this, he was breathing steadily, in through his nostrils and out through his mouth. This certainly wasn’t the mage’s first battle. “It’s not over.”

“Call me ‘toots’ again and I’ll shove that staff exactly where you don’t want it,” I growled, but I followed his line of sight. The creature was shuddering in its invisible restraints, and something scarlet flickered along the surface of its leathery hide. A spiderweb of red lightning rushed to spread over its skin, and it began to stand, flexing its wings and limbs. I could feel the binding enchantment popping and breaking like so many snapped threads.

“Oh, crap,” I said, and thrust my hand into my bag again, frantically casting around for another glass sphere. 

I’m not very good at direct psychokinetic battle magic, what I’ve heard referred to as evocation in some circles. Give me time to prepare, give me time to carefully and meticulously and mathematically construct enchantments set to go off at a certain trigger, or to build a thaumaturgical link and manipulate with ritual, and I can manage. It’s usually by the skin of my teeth, but I’m still alive, so that must count for something.

But sometimes my gadgets, baubles, and carefully laid plans fail me. Darn it all to fucking heck, as Arabella would say. But Arabella wasn’t here, and the only backup I had right now was this smart-mouthed human skyscraper wielding an oversized phallic symbol and Big Thug Energy. Gods grant me patience.

The livid energy crackling over the creature’s body intensified and multiplied, and I felt the last of the binding enchantment fray and snap apart. The creature rolled its neck and stretched its wings as if it had merely woken from a pleasant nap, then lurched itself at us with a shriek. 

The man, evidently still suffering from an acute case of misplaced chivalry, again moved so he was between the creature and me, staff raised as he eyed the creature and the dizzying, psychedelic whirlpool of a portal behind it. With a snarled word, he hurled another kinetic blast at the creature, this time successfully sending it tumbling backwards into the Rift. Then, striding forward a step with his long legs, he lifted his staff again and shouted, _“Instaurabos!”_

“That’s not going to work!” I tried to warn him, assuming he was trying to close what he likely thought was a portal to the Nevernever. 

A second later, the creature came barreling through the whirling lights which had, of course, failed to collapse in on themselves because they were something entirely different than a portal to the Nevernever. It hit the man like a missile and rode him to the ground. I heard him grunt with the impact, his staff clattering to the pavement and rolling away, and he twisted and bucked beneath the creature as it hissed and seized him by the throat, shoving him back down. 

Seemingly heedless of the sudden death-grip on his throat, the man snarled, his teeth bared and his eyes glittering with feral rage, and somehow twisted his body so his left arm and leg were leveraging to the left side of the beast. Then, in one swift, terrifyingly graceful motion, he shoved the creature so it went tumbling off him and rolled to his feet, dropping down into a crouch. My eyes widened as I felt a surge of cold, wild energy, and as I watched, ice began to rapidly crystallize around his fingertips, forming razor-sharp claws. 

The man’s lips peeled back into a savage grin, and I found myself wondering which of the two of them was really more dangerous. 

The creature started to lunge at the man, and he met it with his own attack, darting forward and raking his ice claws at its throat. The creature whirled out of the way, threw itself into the air, and dove at the man, its own claws flexed. The man caught it in some kind of judo throw, slamming the monster to the ground with enough force to crack the pavement.

His lips still curled in a snarl, the man raised his right hand and plunged it towards the creature’s chest, claws first. The monster caught his wrist, surged up, and went for the man’s throat. He canted sideways at the last second, taking its teeth just above his left collarbone instead. With a violent wrench and a spray of blood, he jerked free of the bite. He barely even seemed to notice, and the alley echoed with his furious scream as a jagged, deadly-sharp icicle extended from the palm of his right hand. With a flip of his wrist, still held in the creature’s grasp, he took the makeshift blade in his hand and drove it downward. It tightened its grip on his wrist and resisted, and then there was a flurry of violent movement and furious growling from both fighters, and the monster gave a powerful lurch and threw the man flat on his back.

It followed with blinding speed, leaping on him and driving a bony knee into the man’s chest. It grabbed a fistful of his dark hair, dashing his head once, twice, three times into the ground. Stunned, the man slowed his struggles, though he didn’t entirely stop them. The creature’s hand clamped around his throat again and began to squeeze.

A grating, raspy cough began to emit from the creature as it leaned in close to the man, the sound like broken glass crunching over stone. It took a few seconds for me to realize it was laughing. 

“The Winter Knight and the One Who Forgot,” it cackled, tightening its grip on the man’s throat even as it twisted its head to look at me. Wheezing, the man clawed ineffectually at the creature’s iron grip, and I am ashamed to say I stood frozen. The creature had effectively taken a hostage, and it would only take a small jerk of its hand to snap the man’s neck like a twig. Its black lips peeled back from huge, gleaming canines in what could have equally been a sneer or a snarl. “What a fortuitous chance of a meeting.” 

The man tried to speak, but it came out as a strangled gurgle. The creature leaned down over him, a hair’s breadth from his face, and took a long whiff through its nostrils. Its eyelids fluttered and it made a rolling, guttural sound of pure pleasure. “So much fear tearing through your veins even as you fight to the end. And yet you are ignorant of the true nature of things. Blind little sheep. Lambs to the slaughter. The both of you know so little, and understand even less. Events have been orchestrated that you cannot even begin to fathom. You play your parts well, as ever you have.”

Swallowing back my fear, I lowered my bag to the ground, lifted my hands and stepped forward. “If we’ve got parts to play for you, we’re no good to you dead.”

It grinned at me, giving me another good look at its teeth. “Dead. Alive. Alive and dead. The cat’s ever in the box, little _taistealaiche.__” _It looked down at the man, tilting its head and crooning wordlessly, and I saw that the wizard’s face was taking a purple cast, his lips turning blue. But I also saw what the creature didn’t appear to see: his hand sliding into the right pocket of his leather Inverness coat. 

“But not for either of you,” the creature purred, and the man pulled his hand from his pocket, swung the revolver around, and shot the monster point blank in the face. It fell back and flopped around blindly, wings beating, an unearthly shriek emanating from the gaping, sludge-dripping hole that had been its muzzle.

The man stood up, his breath rattling in his throat, aimed the weapon, and shot the creature in the face again. “Well, I think that cat just climbed out of its box and fucked you right up, oh Melodramatic One,” he rasped_. _He glanced over at me. “Guess it’s not immune to bullets. Let’s see how it likes a little bit of ice.” 

He retrieved his staff, raised it in front of him, and growled, “_Infriga.” _An arctic wave of energy swept forward with a crackling, gleaming sheet of ice rushing into being in its wake along the pavement, and both overtook the creature, rising around it and encasing it like a crystalline monolith.

A beat passed, and the scarlet lightning flickered into visibility as it began to spiderweb beneath the surface of the creature’s temporary prison. The ice groaned and crackled, and a pattern of branching fissures began to appear in its surface.

The man looked at me. “I’m gonna take a wild stab in the dark and say you probably know how to send this thing back and close the portal.”

“Yes.” I was already digging the needed implements out of my bag. There was more to it than what he had said, but one thing at a time.

“Well, let’s get a move on already. What do we need to do?”

I pushed aside another spike of irritation at his words. He had, after all, successfully and competently helped to contain the creature. As much as I hated accepting assistance from strangers, I had to admit that this one would have been too much for me to handle alone. 

I removed a sketch pad, a stick of sharpened charcoal, and a kneaded eraser from my bag and settled cross-legged on the ground, as close to the creature as I dared. “Keep it contained for me. Can you build a circle around us? The creature and me, I mean.”

He peered at the sketch pad, an eyebrow rising on his angular, scarred face. It wasn’t a particularly unattractive face, I thought, even if he made me want to throw something at him every time he opened his mouth. “Your master plan is to Bob Ross it to death?” 

I sighed and mumbled something distinctly unladylike under my breath. As the man used a stub of chalk to create the circle around the creature and I, I took a deep, cleansing breath, then opened my all my senses to gaze into the abyss again.


End file.
